First and foremost, the people who care about whether something is open source (i.e., developers who need access to the source code) are, more than likely, not the people making purchasing decisions. The truth is, open source as an adjective is only as valuable as the community around a project, other than for a developer who may need to modify or inspect the source code for that application. And open source is no guarantee of community — just look at the number of dead or abandoned projects on SourceForge (it makes the 70% failure rate of commercial projects look great). Conversely, plenty of commercial products have fantastic communities.

Open source hasn't meant "free as in beer" in a very long time for many projects. They may offer free community edition versions, but the vendors ride a fine line with making those useful enough to be used, and crippled enough to encourage you to spend money. Many open source applications cost so much for a support contract that their closed source brethren actually have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). If you don't believe me, go check the list price on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and compare it to the cost of support for Windows Server. It's shocking, right? Furthermore, companies have finally discovered that the license cost is usually one of the smaller costs of a project. It's the hardware and the people that make or break the budget most of the time. So if your team is trained in a closed source product, moving to an open source product is very, very expensive.

For quite some time, I've believed that open source is an adjective and not a noun. This means that just because something can be described as open source does not mean that it is automatically faster, most reliable, more secure, less expensive, etc. It is more likely to be those things, but there are no guarantees. I think that customers figured this out too, and vendors are finally catching on as well. There was a time when being an open source vendor could net you a huge IPO, but now the magic has worn off.

Real Software announced the second release of Real Studio 2011. Real Studio is a tool for creating cross-platform desktop and Web applications much faster than traditional systems that compile down to native code. It looks like an interesting system that you should definitely check out.

Editorial and commentary

Five reasons to hate WPF

Richard Mitchell at Simple Talk hates WPF. I agree about the tooling, especially since a lot of developers don't seem comfortable with Blend yet. A bigger issue is the current cloud of doubt over the future of WPF and Silverlight.